For quite a while now I’ve been struggling with the whole social business thing; Where is the line?

When I was brought up, educated and shown the ropes of business it was taboo to mix business with pleasure. You address colleagues and clients by Mr. or Mrs or Sir and Ma’am and your friends by name. For those that fit both categories protocol dictated that you address them based on the occasion. it was straightforward, and easy to remember.

Fast forward to today’s business world on the world wide web… and it’s really hard to see where the line is anymore. Social Marketing on the Internet has taken the business world by storm.. it works! I guess when it comes down to it we always knew it would… Social Marketing online is akin to the base of business: word of mouth for the digital world.
So we have personal websites, business websites, facebook, myspace, linked-in; We blog, tweet, social bookmark, digg, readitt and much much more!

OK, it’s pretty much proven that people like to do business with those they consider friends, and the majority of the people we do business with ourselves we either knew already or they were recommended by friends. So the question is: Do we allow our personal life to spill into our business life and visa-versa?

This is something that I’ve struggled with for quite a while.

Recently I started moving toward a more social (informal) business model, allowing the spill-over to take place and see where it goes. It’s been interesting, to say the least. I still feel weird about sending out a tweet that tells people what I’m doing (socially) and including an SEO or Design Tip in there (business). I’ve also integrated my twitter account with my myspace page and my facebook profile.

On the opposite end of convergence I redid my main business website orionsweb.net using wordpress so I can blog business related items directly on my business site. Then I moved my business related blog posts from my personal blog to the business website.

With only a couple of weeks into the experiment the initial results in my particular case have been more than positive! Business inquiries have skyrocketed, and I’m getting many more personal friends talking to me about business and referring new clients my way! Also (here’s another tip) doing this has brought my search engine rankings up a few more points.

To call this a conundrum is almost an understatement. This is an extremely complex issue, and there’s no real right or wrong answer to the question.

What I’m interested in finding out, are other people’s thoughts on this topic, and their own personal experiences with the de-formalizing of the business environment…

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